Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday February 12, 2014 @11:08PM
from the what's-in-a-name? dept.

sciencehabit writes "On Charles Darwin's 205th birthday, one beetle he found in Argentina is being recognized as a new species. An entomologist discovered the insect, with unusually saw-toothed antennae and a label reading 'C. Darwin', in a collection on loan from the Natural History Museum in London, where it had been misplaced for at least decades. The beetle represented a new species, Darwinilus sedarisi, named after Darwin and the writer David Sedaris, whose audiobooks the scientist listened to while preparing specimens."

All the same, with the boycott going on, I feel like the signal to noise ratio around here has increased. Hey, anybody who is irrationally emotional, doesn't know how to write, and is currently participating in a boycott, please stay away!

Kinda unbelievable that no comments (yet) on this page are based around mocking creationists (as if they visit Slashdot, lol)
Especially when you consider that even when Slashdot was in its better days, threads like this attracted trolls like shit attracted flies.

Actually, the London specimen of beetle was collected by Charles Darwin himself on his journey with the HMS Beagle. But it was never classified. As far as I know, there are only two known specimen, the one in the London Natural History Museum and the other in a collection in Berlin. It is not known if the beetle still lives in the bay Charles Darwin found him, or if the species has died out since.

This beetle really should have been named for Alfred Russel Wallace [wikipedia.org], who came up with the concept of natural selection (independent of Darwin) while studying beetles. He collected some 126,000 species in his time.

Oh, that's right, you intentionally removed them, thereby misquoting me. Then took me to task for failing to recognize how great his accomplishment was in a thread started by myself making the argument that he deserved recognition for his contributions.